Anxiety questions

recession beater

Hi All,

Just looking for some people in similar situations to myself.

I have a well balanced life and have always been a very positive person. I would always look on the bright side and see the good in things rather that the bad.

One night nearly a year ago i was in bed just about to fall asleep when I got this overwhelming feeling of loosing control. I felt as though my body could do its own thing without my consent. It wasnt an out of body experience but it was extremely freightening.

Since then I have had three repetative thought patterns/fears which I cant get out of my head.

Firstly I have a very stressful job and am always on the go. So whenever I sit to relax I find it extremely hard to unwind. I almost feel dizzy when I try to relax. Even when I go to bed my mind races for 10 minutes or so then I begin to fall asleep. Just as my mind relaxes and im about to fall asleep my body either jolts and wakes me up with a tremmer feeling or else it wakes me up because my thoughts are relaxed and doing there own thing and I get this out of control feeling. (I know this is very hard to understand but its very hard to put into words). This may hapen 1-3 times before I fall asleep and generally I will then sleep for the night without any problems. The next morning I wake up and the first thing that pops into my head is am I feeling ok today.

I get up out of bed and get ready for work and go about my daily routine. My day is normally always ok but the problem is I cant stop questioning myself about how im feeling.

I cant look forward to thing that I normally would because I'm scared of how I will feel at that moment in time. Example would be that I used to love to booking holidays and going away with my family. Now I'm scared to book a holiday because im scared of how I will feel when im away or scared of having anxiety attacks when im away.

The next thing is that I fear I will go crazy from all of these crazy thoughts or I will get to a stage that I cant cope with it anymore even though I love life.

I have tried some therapy and spoken to a doctor. The doctor automatically prescribed antianxiety tablets which I didnt take as I do not want to become dependant on them and I dont like the sound of the side effects. The therapy was good but after a few months the therapist and I agreed that the only issue is that I'm not letting this go and tye theraphy was just something else reminding me of it. The therapist also felt that I am completely normal which was a relief.

My next and possibly biggest problem is that I feel that there is no fix for me and I have to live like this forever.

I dont know if im suffering from anxiety or depression or something else different because I dont have full blown anxiety attacks. Just dicomfort which I can control. When it gets bad its like I go into my own world of worry in my head and when im through it i spend the next day or 2 dwelling on it. I can go for a week or so without any problems but then these feelings just hit me and im back to square 1.

I feel that alot of it is down to stress and I need to spend some time relaxing but I fear relaxing because that's when my mind is most active. Its a vicious circle.

This is just a summary of how I have been feeling but I can go into aspects in more detail as I know it may not make sense.

Anyway im just looking for anyone with similar situations or advice or how people have overcome this type of thing.

Thanks in advance.
Stephen.

Pigeonicus1

Hi,

I came on just to share my own story of anxiety in the hope that it may help someone. It's only my own story and maybe people can find something in it that might help them. For about a year I went through really bad depression in the mornings. In the situation I was in, I was not very happy for that year in general and wasn't where I wanted to be. A few things helped me a huge amount though. I found that the depression and worry wore off throughout the day and was gone after work. I actually found out through online research that when I woke up every morning my body wasn't awake enough to be thinking of all the things I was worried about. I found I actually needed to give my body time to wake up and mentally take the day in baby steps which is quite difficult to do as you need to try to hold back racing thoughts.

A big thing that I discovered was the fact that, most of the time, when people are on holidays and not working, they don't experience this kind of morning depression as much. I found that this is because they are not racing through all of the burdens in their head the moment they wake up, whereas when they are required by work to complete tasks, they will have those thoughts a lot more.

Another ground breaking thing for me was a change to my sleep pattern. Again everyone is completely different, but for some reason, instead of going to bed early at around 10/11pm and getting up at 7:00am, I changed my pattern so that I would go to bed at around midnight (1-2 hours later than normal) and wake at about 5:00am (2 hours earlier than normal). I actually woke this way at 5:00am by accident one morning and found that although I was tired, it was as if my body wasn't tired enough so as to have to really slowly get used to being awake again in the morning- if that makes sense? So I was tired, but I wasn't anxious and depressed. It wwas like my brain had the 'just right' conditions to pick up my thoughts quickly again. (Then again if I had tried to sleep longer hours than normal, I'm assuming it would have been really helpful, but this worked for me at the time anyway).

I have also come to discover that alcohol seriously contributes to my anxiety levels- Up to even a month or so after even one night of drinking. To be honest, I've actually been amazed at just how much my anxiety comes from alcohol. After giving it up for months it was nearly like I had no anxiety issues. It really really does affect my emotions even a long time after a night out.

Exercise can seriously help clear my head as well. At the end of a long run for example, I've spent all my energy on the run, and even forget the worries for a brief period.

I like to look up quotes about worries. Some of the best information I found about worrying is that there is a difference between worrying and PLANNING. Worrying: I throw myself in to the future situation, imagining what will/could happen. Like playing a scary movie about the future in my head. Although I have good reason to be scared when I worry-it's all made up,because it hasn't happened. Planning: I think about potential situations that may happen in the future and I make a plan in the present moment about how to handle the situations that may happen. This plan happens in the here and now, and once I'm finished planning, I don't give another thought about it, unless I need to add to the plan.

“That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent." - Chinese Proverb” (I can't stop the worrying thoughts coming to me, but it's what I do with them that makes the difference)

This is all only my story and how I dealt with my own level of depressing/anxious feelings. At the time, I remember wishing that someone could have told me all this really quickly, as I spent the year learning it. I still am learning for myself. But I can say with certainty that my knowledge of all of the above definitely helped me anyway.